


From One World to the Next

by Cumberbatch Critter (ivelostmyspectacles)



Series: Alvin and Jude - Their Epic Bromance [4]
Category: Tales of Xillia
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Death, Gen, Ghosts, Spirits, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-28
Updated: 2015-06-28
Packaged: 2018-04-06 14:45:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4225875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivelostmyspectacles/pseuds/Cumberbatch%20Critter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alvin shot Jude.</p><p>Alvin killed Jude.</p><p> </p><p>So why is Alvin hearing Jude's voice?</p>
            </blockquote>





	From One World to the Next

**Author's Note:**

> This idea got in my head and wouldn't get out. I know there's some other supernatural stories within this fandom, but none that I saw that took this route, so yeah, I decided to give it a shot! Tender Alvin is such a rare Alvin.
> 
> I do not own _Tales of Xillia_.

_Alvin._

It's impossible, Alvin is sure, that he can hear Jude's voice in the moments where the world stops around him. One moment, he's standing on the outskirts of Nia Khera, monsters trilling around him, the crunching of grass beneath his boots and the sun glaring into his eyes, and the next, there's a gust of wind that ruffles his hair, the atmosphere grows heavy and the sound falls to nothing and he hears _Jude_.

Which is impossible, because Jude is dead.

Then Presa says something to him, or Agria complains too loudly, and Alvin is back in the present. There's the chirps of the insects, the screeches of the enemies, and the sound of life around him. Jude isn't there, and he will never be again.

Guilt eats away in Alvin's stomach, but he follows the Chimeriad dutifully. There is nowhere else for him to be.

 _Alvin_.

He loses sleep at night, thinking he hears Jude's voice tangled up in his nightmares the way that he's tangled up in the blankets. It does nothing to alleviate the crushing pain that's settled just beneath his temples, but he learns to live with it. It's just one of those things. Like the guilt, the confusion, the loss.

He hadn't meant to shoot him. Like that matters now.

It doesn't, and Alvin has to learn to live with it.

_Alvin!_

The phantasm of the voice in his head is almost a welcome presence after some time. He has ended up turning against the Chimeriad. That's all he's ever good for. Joining the party again is more desolate that he could have ever envisioned. The lack of Jude is... is a lack of Jude. There are no words to describe it. He is told to do what he wants, with a lack of direct conversation from any of the group. He goes with them, because he betrayed the Chimeriad to protect them and now there really _is_ no place for him.

That's okay.

He doesn't deserve that luxury.

_Alvin-_

It's possibly the worst bed that he's ever slept in, and he's slept in a lot of inns. But the mattress is small and cramped, and the pillow makes his headache worse. The voices (voice) in his head makes it impossible to sleep, so he opens his eyes instead.

There's a hand in front of him, and Alvin very nearly has a heart attack.

He's grateful that he has a room entirely to himself, because the fact that he very nearly falls right out of bed would grate on his nearly nonexistant pride, just a little.

The hand is connected to an arm, to shoulders, a neck and a body, a familiar face framed with brown hair with amber eyes.

"... Jude," Alvin breathes, meeting forever frozen fifteen year old eyes that are looking back at him with just about as much surprise as Alvin feels.

The apparation opens its mouth as though to speak and then, vanishes.

Alvin sits bolt upright in the uncomfortable inn bed, and stares at the spot where Jude (not Jude) had been standing.

_Alvin... y...ou..._

It happens three days later, and Alvin can't chalk it up to a lack of sleep. He sees Jude in the middle of the day, in broad daylight, giving him such a _Jude_ look that it almost makes Alvin want to laugh if he didn't simultaneously want to... maybe cry.

Ah.

He drops the bowl of potato soup that he's been nursing, and the shattering sound of glass and liquid hitting the floor startles him out of the reverie he's in. Jude's apparation vanishes, and the rest of the party looks at him like he's crazy.

Maybe he is.

He leaves in the middle of the night, because he has his own demons to slay. He doesn't know what draws him to the Xailen Woods Temple, but it's the nearest sort of place and he goes there without conscious thought. He isn't sure what is going to await him when he arrives there, but he's going to find out.

"Alvin."

His stomach drops (again, again) at the familiar voice. He had thought that he had grown used to it. He hasn't. He won't, because...

"... You're dead," Alvin breathes. Forces himself to turn around, forces himself to face the... boy he'd murdered. His friend. The friend he'd murdered.

Jude looks exactly like he had months ago, back when Alvin had unwittingly, unwillingly, _stupidly_ shot him. Jude looks exactly like he had as he had died, sans the blood blossoming from his chest. He's a little more pale and only slightly transluscent, but it's him.

Alvin can barely breathe.

"You can finally see me," Jude says, perching on the armrest of the pew. "I didn't think I'd be able to make it happen, but I did."

Alvin takes a step forward. Reaches out his hand. He's shaking, can't stop shaking. He draws in a slow, deep breath, curls his fingers into his palms briefly. Touches Jude's shoulder.

Except he doesn't. His hand goes through where Jude's shoulder is, and his fingers are emcompassed in a cold so intense that it shakes him to his core. He jerks his hand back, gasping to breathe, dread and unease in his bones.

"I'm not totally here," Jude continues, as he watches Alvin critically. "I'm not a physical presence. Try to touch me and everything you regret, all of your misgivings, you feel them at all once. I guess that's where the old story comes from. It's cold where a spirit is? It's just what you make it."

"Jude..." Alvin cannot find anything else to say. The words that should come are lodged in his throat, and he knows he won't get them out. _Knows_. He's never been good with those kinds of things. But those are things that need to be said. "I..."

"I know you didn't mean to," Jude interrupts. "Don't worry." He smiles, head falling to the side minutely, and he looks so perfectly _content_ that Alvin has to sit down.

He sinks onto the pew behind him and grips onto the rough, unkept wood that makes up the furniture. He needs something to ground himself. How can Jude look happy when he's _dead_? Alvin is still alive, and he hasn't felt that happy in years. He's acutely jealous. Of a murdered fifteen year old.

The thought makes him cringe. Only a bit.

"I'm worried about you," Jude says.

Alvin flinches. Those words hurt more than any physical wound could have managed to at that time. "... _Why_?" he demands, although it comes out more as a gasp than anything else.

Pull yourself together, Alvin.

 _I can't,_ he thinks. _I'm talking to the kid I murdered months ago._

"Because you haven't been the same," Jude replies. "Since you shot me."

He finds it in himself to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth. "Do you expect me to _not_ be affected by that?"

"You joined the Chimeriad." The distaste is evident in Jude's voice. It's that tone of voice that is almost critical, but then not quite, because it's Jude.

"... Yes," Alvin mutters.

"But then you came back."

"... Yes." He can't even say that with conviction, because it had been on a whim, a last chance. "Not because I wanted to."

"You wanted to," Jude retorts, and Alvin looks back at him. "You didn't want our friends to get hurt."

Alvin thinks it through. He's right, of course he's right. But Alvin isn't sure to what end, why he made the choices he had, even now.

"But you're still hurting."

At this, Alvin huffs a laugh. "I deserve it, kid."

"No one deserves that." Jude crosses his arms. "Not even you."

Alvins thinks he's wrong. He'll probably continue to think that he's wrong, but arguing with a ghost feels both pointless and wrong. Instead, he turns his head away and mumbles "Do gooder" under his breath.

Jude hears him. Maybe he has some freaky supernatural ghost hearing.

"Some people don't change," he says, and then pauses. "... But then again, some people do."

Alvin arrives halfway through their fight with Maxwell, his heart thudding in his chest in a way that he's unaccustomed to feeling. Adrenaline. _Life_. He readies his blade. Glances to the right and behind his shoulder and sees amber eyes blazing with determination.

Alvin smiles, snaps off a witty one-liner to no one (only one) in particular, and launches into battle.

 _Say you're sorry,_ Jude whispers in his head after everything has settled down. Alvin looks at Milla Maxwell and thinks that he would get on his knees for this woman if he could atone for his sins by begging forgiveness.

But that won't help, can't help.

Alvin does say he's sorry. He means it this time. He isn't consciously aware of meaning it, but the ache produced in his chest is unlike any other feeling he's possessed for a long time, and he knows that this is at least one thing he can say with certainty that he isn't lying about.

Milla looks at him with those clear eyes, so full of determination, so very like Jude.

"Very well," she says. "I believe you. That is what Jude would want us to do."

It doesn't fix everything. Hell, Alvin isn't sure that it fixes anything. But Milla is more social towards him after that, Rowen follows suit, and then Leia and Elize as well. He can hold a conversation with them, and it stops feeling awkward after a spell.

The only thing is, at the time that Milla says it, she looks over Alvin's right shoulder and just _stares_ for a moment too long to be normal. Alvin glances back on reflex to sees his ghostly haunt behind him, but when he looks back, Milla has turned away. He looks back at Jude as if to ask the silent question, but the words stick in his throat as Jude rubs wetness away from his eyes.

Ghosts can cry, at least in their own, altered plane.

"I'm sorry."

"You don't have to keep saying that." Jude sits on the fence in Nia Khera, legs swinging as they don't touch the ground. Just a kid.

"Yes, I do." Alvin ignores the looks that he gets from the villagers as he waits on Milla. They haven't seen - can't see - what he sees.

"Don't worry about me, Alvin."

"Yeah, well, you shouldn't have to be worrying about me, either..." His words don't come off as snarky as he would like them to, but then, maybe that's a good thing. Change, Jude had said.

"Oh, come on. If I'm gonna haunt somebody, it had to be you."

"Why?" Alvin looks at him with eyes narrowed in thought. "Why me, anyway?Why not Milla or someone?"

Jude gets that far-off look in his eyes like he always does when Milla speaks, or when they speak about Milla. Alvin knows that he wishes he were there. "Milla," Jude says softly, drawing Alvin back to the present, "knows what she wants." He blinks, and meets Alvin's gaze. "But I want to be here to help _you_ figure it out. What do you want, Alvin?"

He cannot answer.

The seasons change. Their mission continues. Their, not _her_ , because he's a part of it now, too.

He talks to Jude routinely. Not every day, and not whole conversations sometimes. He'll get the odd _You're not eating properly_ or _Make sure to watch that wound you got last week_ , and he'll snap back with a quick response in the affirmative, but sometimes they don't get the time to talk.

Hamil and the Xailen Woods Temple are the best places to talk to Jude. Alvin isn't sure why. He guesses because Hamil is... yeah... and the Temple is a holy place. There's no interference when he talks to Jude there, and he can talk to him for hours. He realises now how much he had in common with the kid, or just how much he had to talk about with him, at the very least. _You don't know what you got..._ he thinks sardonically, and shivers as their arms accidentally brush together during one of their chats.

"I was thinking..."

"Really?" Alvin retorts, and then looks up with a raised eyebrow and a grin that falters when he notices that Jude's face is unnaturally serious. "... What?"

"Uh..." Jude jerks his attention back to him. "Nothing. Nevermind."

Alvin tilts his head. "Jude?"

"It's nothing." Jude smiles. "Really."

He has long since returned home at this point, although they come and go from Rieze Maxia to Elympios as though there hadn't been a rift between them in the first place.

On one particularly memorable trip, Leia and Elize find a light-leaf clover on behalf of a request from Balan, and Alvin is taken back memory lane as his cousin recounts childhood tales.

The stories he chooses to tell could be worse - they could be better! - but he presses his knuckles against his lips to hide the laughter that threatens to expose him. If they caught him laughing at his own young stupidity, Balan would find it as a reason to never stop telling stories.

Jude's presence in the room flickers and vanishes. It's not an uncommon thing. Apparently, the rift between worlds is an unstable one, and Jude expends his own kind of energy to be in the mortal realm.

But he doesn't come back.

Alvin doesn't see him for three, four, five days. He feels strangely bereft without his constant companion, although they get so suddenly busy that he doesn't have much time to think about it.

_Alv..._

Alvin jerks awake. There's no one there.

"Jude...?" he says hesitantly.

"Alvin? Is something the matter?" Oh, now he's woken Rowen up.

Alvin looks around the room, and shakes his head. "No. Thinking out loud, is all. Sorry that I woke you." He thumps his head back into his pillow, and stares at the ceiling.

_Al..._

He thinks that he might actually be losing his mind.

The voice in his head has gone from sentences to his name, and not his name, but a shortened version: Al. It has lost its tone, and ‘Al’ comes out as a mixture of Jude's voice and Presa's voice. Alvin doesn't know if he's dreaming or hearing, but he cannot handle more than one voice in his head. Not a chance.

It's only Jude, but he doesn't learn that for some time.

When he does, he's unconscious.

Jude looks exactly the way that he should. Not transparent, not ghostly, not anything like Alvin's been seeing the past... months? How long has it been now? He's lost track of time. Each day doesn't crawl by like it used to.

But Jude looks different. Normal. Alvin isn't used to him being entirely normal as of late. That's how Alvin knows that he's dreaming.

"Where have you been, kid?"

Jude scuffs his shoes against the ground. "I can't get back to the mortal realm."

Alvin frowns. "What?"

"My... ghost self. What you've been seeing. I can't get back to you in the waking world anymore."

"Why not?"

"Because..." Jude stares at the ground.

Alvin has a sinking feeling that he decidedly does not like. "Jude. What do you know that I don't?" he demanded. An answer was not forthcoming, so Alvin pushed ahead relentlessly. "Jude. No secrets. You and I, our whole party, that's what you all taught me. Right?"

It feels absolutely ridiculous to say that. It's a mark of measure that he doesn't want to take it back.

"I have to go."

Alvin stops. "... What?"

Jude sighs and looks up. "I've got to move on, Alvin."

"Why?"

"Because I'm not meant to be here?" Jude frowns. "I don't know. I was here to watch you and I think..."

"You're tried of watching over me now?"

Jude shakes his head. "No... I think... you're happy now."

Alvin tenses up. Happy? He doesn't know what happy is. The construct is foreign to him. Abstract. Except... he is. Happy. Somehow. Impossibly. He isn't... disconnected from the rest of the world. He may even have a way to make it better. No more mercenary stuff; that's behind him. Is he... happy?

The thought of being happy is terrifying.

The thought of that all being torn away with a simple action is terrifying. Terrifying, and possible.

"The fact that you aren't arguing means I'm right." Jude smiles. "Which is good. I'm glad you got that second chance."

"Second?" Alvin asks thinly. More like third, fourth, fifth, seventeenth.

"People can change," Jude says firmly. "You did."

"Oh, Jude." Alvin blows out a breath and ruffles his fingers through his hair.

Jude laughs. He looks sad and happy at the same time. "Don't look so upset. You've got plenty of _real_ friends on the other side."

"You're a real friend."

" _Living_ friends," Jude clarifies.

Alvin sighs. _I'd rather have the dead ones_ is a pathetic thing to say, so he doesn't. And he doesn't wish all of his friends were dead, nor does he want to abandon the living ones. "Don't know what I'm going to do without you chewing my ear off..."

"You'll survive." Jude smiles, a little sarcastically. "We'll see each other again. Hopefully not for a long time," he adds, "but I'll be waiting for you."

"Corny," Alvin mutters. He can't help but deflect. Emotions have never been his strong suit, even if he has... changed.

Jude only laughs in response, and holds out his hand. "Be good, Alvin."

"... I should be telling you that," Alvins murmurs. He hesitates, and then takes Jude's hand tightly. "I'll miss you. More than I thought possible. We all do."

"I know. I appreciate it. Tell them, for me, okay?"

"Yeah." Alvin hesitates again, and then tightens his grip on Jude's hand and pulls him in for a hug. Something that he hasn't done in a long time. Jude's touch isn't cold now. It's warm, in fact, heat emanating from the place where Alvin tucks him up against his chest. "... Thank you," he mumbles. "Thank you."

Jude laughs, hot breath against Alvin's collarbone. His hands are heavy against the small of Alvin's back. "You changed my life, too," he murmurs.

"For the worse."

"For the better."

Alvin can't help but chuckle. It falters when the pressure against his back lessens, and then vanishes. Alvin is left empty-handed, staring into the darkness.

It's only then that he realises that he's wide awake, staring blankly into nothing. His body is warm, but the tightness in his throat lessens the degree of contentedness.

"Alvin?"

All of them are staring at him with concerned eyes. Actual concern.

"What's wrong?"

"Why are you crying?"

Alvin blinks rapidly, raising his fingers to his eyes. They come away wet, and he blinks in surprise. "... I'm okay."

"Are you sure?"

"Are you injured?" Milla asks.

Alvin looks away from his fingers. Looks at Milla. Tilts his head and doesn't falter in his response. "No... I'm good." Rethinks it. Despite the circumstances... "I'm great."

**Author's Note:**

> ~~I really didn't mean it to be of shippy but it really kind of went there~~


End file.
